Now is the ideal moment to start working with a timetable consultant while there is still enough time to review your curriculum and make strategic decisions for the next academic year. By acting now, you can ensure these decisions align with your school’s priorities while also improving efficiency.
Schools often find it invaluable to gain a fresh perspective on their curriculum and staffing models. With school budgets under increasing pressure, and staffing being the largest expenditure, it is crucial to optimise both curriculum planning and staffing structures. Aligning these effectively can lead to significant cost savings.
This is why engaging a timetable consultant at this stage is so beneficial. It ensures that any job adverts or curriculum changes fit within the school’s long-term staffing strategy, helping to create a more sustainable and cost-effective approach.
Completing the review before making appointments for the next academic year is particularly beneficial, as it provides the ideal opportunity to assess which roles genuinely need to be filled. Schools often undergo small changes that make a like-for-like replacement unsuitable when someone leaves. These adjustments may be minor, such as hiring a teacher who can deliver both French and Spanish rather than just Spanish, or more substantial, such as choosing not to fill a previous post and restructuring internally.
The review also examines student subject choices for GCSE (and, where applicable, A Level in sixth-form settings). With years of experience in schools, a timetable consultant can often suggest options that may not have been considered—providing insights that lead to more effective curriculum planning.
We can complete a curriculum review with minimal input from the school—often, access to the timetable file is enough. Using this, we analyse staff deployment, curriculum time allocation, and the current timetable. We can identify where teachers are under or over-allocated, suggest ways to redeploy staff, inform option block planning, and make comparisons against national benchmarks using Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning (ICFP) tools. This analysis helps highlight opportunities for cost savings.
If a school is considering changes to its curriculum model, we are happy to incorporate this into the review. Our report will outline the impact of these changes on staffing and timetabling, offering long-term staffing projections and equipping schools with the tools to make informed staffing adjustments year after year.
If desired, we can also do a thorough analysis using ICFP tools to compare key metrics with other institutions, providing a clearer understanding of the school’s position and, if necessary, supporting a case for change. These tools include comparisons of pupil-teacher ratio, average class size, teacher workload, teacher contact ratio, cost per lesson, and average teacher cost.
Following the review, we provide a formal report summarising strengths, areas for development, and recommendations for improvement.
Employing a timetable consultant now and obtaining this report earlier in the academic year could lead to significant cost savings in the future!
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